Roger Gilbert reading A. R. Ammons's:   "Sweetened Change"   "Parting"   from Garbage, section 11 Listen to A. R. Ammons reading:   "A Nature Walk"   "Hymn"   "In Memoriam"   "Nelly Myers" (MP3 files) Recordings courtesy of Roger Gilbert.

North Carolina native A. R. Ammons (1926-2001) wrote nearly thirty books of poetry, including Glare (1997); Garbage (1993); A Coast of Trees (1981); Sphere (1974); and Collected Poems, 1951-1971 (1972). He twice won the National Book Award (for Garbage and his Collected Poems), the Bollingen Prize for Sphere, and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry for A Coast of Trees. Included among his many honors were the Academy of American Poets’ Wallace Stevens Award, the Poetry Society of America’s Robert Frost Medal, the Ruth Lilly Prize, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. This year, Roger Gilbert, the Archie K. Davis Fellow and a colleague of Ammons’s from the English department at Cornell University, is working on the first artistic biography of the poet, examining the influences that coalesced in his sensitive, reflective verse. We sat down with Roger Gilbert to discuss Ammons’s poetry, his early life in rural North Carolina, and the elements that characterize the work of this major American poet.

Q: During your project talk at the beginning of the year, you mentioned one of the challenges in writing a biography of A. R. Ammons was that the details of his life appear fairly mundane. But Ammons himself once said that “anything looked at closely becomes wonderful.” So, I am wondering, in the time you have been working on this project, what has become wonderful for you about Ammons’s life and work?

A: Well, that’s a nice way of putting it. I’ve discovered that so much of what Ammons experienced as a child and as a teenager clearly had a profound impact on him, on his imagination, on his poetry. I hadn’t realized how interested I would get in the basic elements of his early life, including the farm and all that came with it, like tobacco, mules, pigs, chickens—Ammons had very particular relationships with all of these things. His family was also an important influence, of course, not just his mother and father and two sisters, but also the extended family, most of whom lived nearby. And now I’m starting to dig into his early education and, maybe even more importantly, his early religious experiences: going to church, singing hymns, hearing sermons. Those were encounters that Ammons always cited as having provided his first exposure to words and poetry and music, everything that ultimately led him to become a poet.

Q: You mention religion, and some critics of his work have noted his particular religious view and tried, perhaps, to trace a religious journey through his career. How do you read the religious elements in his work?

A: It’s an interesting question. I think there are some critics who would like to say unequivocally that he is a religious poet and others who would deny that. Ammons himself always said in later life that he was an agnostic. But he grew up going to church. In fact he was affiliated with several different churches; his mother was a Methodist and his father was a Baptist, but the nearest church was the Fire Baptized Holiness Pentecostal Church, and that was the one that he attended most often. So he got bits and pieces of slightly different versions of Protestant Christianity. Certainly as a child he was quite devout, and especially loved the hymns. He was also mesmerized by the sermons he heard, especially the fire-and-brimstone parts. And he was deeply impressed by the spectacle of people speaking in tongues, though he never did it himself. Later he went to Wake Forest, which was at the time very much a Baptist school, where chapel was mandatory three times a week. By that time he was becoming less emotionally attached to religion, and was reading things that caused him to question at least some of what he’d been taught in church. In interviews later on he described an experience he had in the Navy that he felt represented a turning point for him. He was sitting on the bow of a ship looking at an island, thinking about the level of the water and the level of the land and of all of the physical forces that were contributing to this relationship between land and sea, and at that moment he became aware of the universe as a place that operated according to its own laws. Suddenly there was no God in charge of things. And yet even after he ceased to be a traditional believer he continued to love the old hymns he had heard as a child. The impulse toward some kind of worship, some kind of devotion, was always there in him. He liked to speak of this in terms of religious feelings, rather than beliefs or faith. One of his first poems that really got people’s attention was called “Hymn.” It begins, “I know if I find you I will have to leave the earth,” but the “you” is left unspecified. He doesn’t capitalize the Y because he doesn’t want the poem to be too obviously a prayer, yet it’s hard to avoid the feeling that he’s addressing some kind of higher power. When people asked him about it he would be noncommittal and say it could be God, it could be some sense of the universe as a kind of ultimate source. He didn’t want to be pinned down to a particular doctrine or dogma or conception of divinity.

Q: That agnostic questioning mode in some of his poetry seems to speak, in a sense, of a kind of pilgrimage—of a figure who is reverent but at the same time somewhat lonely. Has your research uncovered where that quality originates?

A: I think the loneliness, the sense of solitude, does absolutely come from his childhood. He felt very lonely as a child, even though he had a loving family. The farm that he grew up on was pretty far from town. I don’t think he had many friends, certainly not male companions. And that lack of male companionship was something he felt keenly. When he was four years old his younger brother, Elbert, who was about 18 months old, died suddenly from an illness that I haven’t been able to identify. In fact Archie felt that he might have been responsible for Elbert’s death. He wrote a poem that he never published in which he remembers being in the house with Elbert when the rest of the family was away and seeing him eating lots of raw peanuts. In the poem Ammons says something like, “Did I really know he shouldn’t be eating so many raw peanuts?” And the next day Elbert got sick and died. Now, how could a four-year-old possibly have known that someone could die from eating raw peanuts? Nevertheless, Elbert died, and so Archie lost a potential playmate and companion, someone who would have been out in the fields helping him with chores and going with him to school. Then the next year another brother was stillborn. So Archie was the only male child. He was close to his sisters, especially the younger of the two, who was only two years older than him; they remained very, very close for the rest of his life. But that wasn’t to keep him from feeling he was basically alone. Throughout his life he maintained this sense of being essentially solitary. It’s certainly there in his poetry. You spoke about the pilgrim-like qualities, which are especially clear in his early poems, where he presents himself as a solitary wanderer in the desert. He often said that he wrote for other people who felt as alone as he did. He didn’t like to give poetry readings because he didn’t like to see his audience as a group. He preferred to think of his poems as being sent out to single people, people who were sitting alone in a room somewhere rather than a great mass of people who were all together. Each poem was a message from him to another solitary person or a series of solitary people. He, from his solitude, was trying to help others come to terms with their solitude. Now, of course, he was married, very happily married. He had a son. He had colleagues whom he loved, and he spent a lot of time in his office and in the café in his building at Cornell just hanging around and talking to people. But he needed to do all that precisely to alleviate his sense of solitude, of never being able to completely connect with other people.

Q: Besides this quality of spiritual seeking what would you say are the characteristics typical of an Ammons poem?

A: There are some obvious things, like the fact hat he prefers the colon to all other punctuation. Often a whole poem of his will be held together by colons. There won’t be any periods, so in effect it will be a single long sentence, although not a grammatically conventional one. The colons give the poem a kind of headlong feeling of just never stopping, which was an effect he liked. He also liked to say that the colon was more democratic because it took away the need to use capital letters, which he thought were elitist. Another very obvious feature is his love of the language of science. This goes back to his education at Wake Forest, where he majored in science. Almost at the beginning of his career he incorporated more words associated with science than any other poet at the time was doing. For many poets this vocabulary was the antithesis of poetic language. Yet he found ways to use it so that it took on a music of its own and at the same time opened up a sense of reality that was more rooted in physical phenomena and the intricacies of biology and chemistry. So both stylistically and in terms of content this really represented an expansion of what was possible in poetry and, I think, has had a lasting effect on American poetry.

But there are other things that make his poems sound so distinctive. It’s partly the conversational tone in many of them. And also the range of language that he brings into play. There is the reverent language of hymns and prayers and sermons that he never completely got away from. And then there is the language of scientific particularity and analysis and interest in all of the minute processes that govern everything from goldfinches to trees to planets and galaxies. And then he also loved the kind of raunchy, dirty, slangy vernacular language that he picked up from his father. So you get a wonderful mix of different levels and different kinds of language. There was absolutely nothing that he wouldn’t put into a poem. He occasionally would hold back because he knew one of his sisters would be reading it— that was the only thing that could get him to censor himself. But for the most part, I don’t think there is a single word you could think of that isn’t in one of his poems somewhere, no matter how “low.”

Q: I suppose, for a poet who composed an entire book-length poem about a trash heap, that is terribly appropriate.

A: Absolutely. In fact, there is a kind of moral and even, I would say, religious impulse behind both his insistence on including every kind of language he could think of, from the lowest to the highest, but also his celebration of things like garbage and other sorts of detritus and waste and weeds. He loved to write about weeds, which are a kind of living garbage, if you think about it. They are the plants we define as unwanted, but precisely for that reason he was drawn to them. And it was all part of his sense that anything you look at long enough becomes wonderful. There is nothing so low that it can’t become an object of wonder, that it can’t receive radiance, that it can’t reveal a sort of beauty to the eye. He has a great poem called “Still” in which he begins by saying, “I said I will find what is lowly,” and then goes on a kind of pilgrimage or search in which he looks into all sorts of places and things trying to find something that is lowly, and he can’t find anything that is lowly. Nothing ultimately appears low to him because it is all infused with life, and with a kind of divinity.

Roger Gilbert reading A. R. Ammons's (MP3 files):

  "Sweetened Change"
  "Parting"
  from Garbage, section 11


Listen to A. R. Ammons reading (MP3 files):

  "A Nature Walk"
  "Hymn"
  "In Memoriam"
  "Nelly Myers"

Recordings courtesy of Roger Gilbert.